Shopping online can be a great experience. You don’t have to leave the comfort of your home and you can quickly compare and read about all the competing products in order to pick the best one for you. But it can also be a little frustrating if the process isn’t designed correctly.

Looking around for that checkout link, having to fill out registration forms and then being told the product is out of stock isn’t going to make your day. Spend a little bit of time fine tuning your checkout process and polishing off the user experience and you’ll be rewarded with happier customers and more sales. Here are 12 useful tips to help you do just that.

Last year over 10 million US small businesses were prioritizing eCommerce initiatives (Forrester), yet the eCommerce world remains a nightmare of confusion and complexity. It’s that nightmare that BigTurns puts to rest with it's all-in-one software, a web-based application that makes running an online store easy by bringing together all the tools that business owners need to succeed. In contrast to existing solutions, BigTurns completely replaces the traditional website-ecommerce pair with a holistic “online business” approach that puts the spotlight on understanding your customers and getting better results – whilst saving time and money.

One of the most important things to keep a grip on when you run a business is the overheads. It’s so easy to let the cost of the “basics” mount up
and start effecting your bottom line. We are going to outline how I first launched my office on a total shoestring but through being a bit savvy made
sure that I didn’t compromise on any of the basics.

So in truth this post is half about me being a bit savvy and the half about me having made mistakes that hopefully I can now stop you making.

BigTurns is an online business platform. What’s an “online businesss” platform? If you’ve not come across this concept before you probably talk about a CMS (content management system). BigTurns platform at its most basic level is a CMS system, but it’s so much more…

What BigTurns does is take all the elements that a traditional online business needs to be successful and merge them into one holistic solution. The elements that I’m talking about are CMS, e-commerce, email marketing, CRM, analytics and reporting.

Typically a business will run all these systems separately in different environments. By doing it all in one place will save you money, but having these fully integrated can make marketing so much more targeted and accountable. Calculating ROI on email campaigns and affiliate schemes is so much easier and can done “out of the box”.

The system also helps to build accurate profiles of your customers because every interaction they have with your website, whether it be completing a form or buying a product is recorded against their CRM record as can every email you have with them. This means any member of staff can pick up that customer and at a glance can see exactly their history with the company.

Do your customers pay on time? Do you spend more than 1/2 a day a week collecting payments from delinquent accounts? When you call for payment do your customers pay by Credit Card? Would you like to automate your accounts receivables?

The Process to Automating Your AR Collections

First, you want to take a look at your Aged Receivables. Do you have many customers past due over 30 days? Over 60 days? Over 90 days? Do you have a system or process to collect the funds?

Point is, most small businesses don't have the time to effectively manage their Aged Receivables. A lot of the time, small business owners don't focus on collecting payments until a cash crunch hits - like pay roll.

So, we need to build a system to communicate to your customers in a organized and systematic way to show that you are: 1. on the ball and 2. coming for your money. How do we do this, you ask? Easy.

Automated Multi-Step Email Collection Campaign

Step 1:

We create a 5 part email campaign to send to your Delinquent Accounts.

Email 1, is polite reminding them to pay their bill

Email 2, questions their delay in payment

Email 3, The language is "Concerned" and requests payment again

Email 4, The language is stern and demands payment now

Email 5, Notifies the customer hat their account has gone to collections.

After the last email is sent we set up a "WorkFlow notification to automatically email the AR manager and the collections department about the Delinquent account.

The wording is customizable in the template. In that, you can say what you want, but you will need to say the same message to every customer in the same time frame.

About 4 years ago, we were looking into starting a new business, online. As an accomplished businessman we started thinking about what we were going to need to be successful. A website was the obvious starting point. It had to be easy enough to add and change content - because websites live or die on the basis of fresh, useful content.

Next - we needed a way to manage leads and customers. You need to be able to react quickly to new leads and follow up on old ones. Then, marketing. Email marketing to be precise. A permission based list of people who are receptive to hear your message is priceless. And don't forget - online shopping. Selling online is the most important function we needed to do. We wanted to process orders 24 hours a day.

That's a basic list. There's more, like community forums, affiliate programs, blogs and so forth. But let's keep it simple, ok?

So, checklist in hand (we are pretty organized kinda guys) we went looking for something to do all this and we found Content Management Systems, and Customer Relationship Management systems, and Shopping carts, and Email Marketing Solutions, and Site Analytics. So we signed up to all these services and downloaded what we needed to download.

OK great, we thought, let's get started!....Or not.

We got frustrated. Because running any business is a little like racing a car. You've got to push hard, stay ahead of the pack and be smart about how you race. But our problem wasn't that we couldn't race. We were wasting our time trying to build the nice, fast car.

The other problem was we found ourselves spending a lot of time trying to keep all his separate systems in sync. And more than once we forgot one of the five or six log in details we were supposed to remember.

This is the first Post for The eCommerce Blog from Sales and Marketing Automation.

Our mission with this blog is to promote eCommerce Best Practices to Small business owners. We will be including topics that relate to building eCommerce Sites, marketing eCommerce Sites and managing eCommerce Sites.

We are not sure where this journey will take us but the general direction we are going to set out on is to expose the tricks that make successful sites sell.

I will be the main contributor to the blog postings, and all of our contributors will some how be related to BigTurns Business Systems, an eCommerce Consulting Company with an eCommerce Platform for sale and a team of eCommerce Consultants.